Creativity and Well‐being: A Meta‐analysis

By Selcuk Acar, Harun Tadik, D. Myers, C. V. D. Sman, Recep Uysal. The Journal of creative behavior, 2020

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Creativity and well-being are popular subjects in psychological and organizational studies. The recent literature presented mixed perspectives about the nature of the relationship between the two. Whereas the mad-genius hypothesis, which was often explored among eminently creative individuals, seems to imply a negative relationship between the two, trends in the field of creativity, such as everyday creativity and general psychology (i.e., positive psychology) linked them positively. The present meta-analysis study synthesized 189 effect sizes obtained from 32 samples in 26 different studies based on a total sample of 8,189. Analyses with multilevel modeling yielded a mean effect of r = .14. The moderator analysis tested the impact of age, gender, measure of creativity, measure of well-being, stimulus type of creativity measure, and index of creativity measure. Only the creativity measure explained the variation in the study outcomes. The relationship between creativity and well-being was significantly higher when creativity was measured by instruments focusing on creative activity and behavior ( r = .22) than the divergent thinking tasks ( r = .06). Those findings are discussed in terms of theoretical and practical implications.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7236ea82e7ef244414c6ae05eb7782b12c69b577